• The Centre-fuge Public Art Project took over a temporary trailer, serving as an office for people working on the Second Avenue subway line, and transformed the construction site into an art gallery for the community.

• Art. Write. Now., an exhibition of art by teenagers from across the country selected by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, opens at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery and the Sheila C. Johnson Center at the Parsons School of Design. [Free]

• Note to travelers: AirTrain JFK service is being partially shut down until Monday for maintenance.

AND FINALLY …

Saturday is the 147th running of the Belmont Stakes on Long Island, and American Pharoah could be the first horse in more than 30 years to win the coveted Triple Crown.

But we were surprised to learn that the Belmont Stakes were originally run in the Bronx, at what is now the Jerome Park Reservoir.

Leonard Jerome, a financier in the city, built the racetrack, and August Belmont Sr., for whom the race was named, supplied the funds.

(As many of you have noted, that same Mr. Jerome was Winston Churchill’s maternal grandfather.)

Less than 20 years after it had opened, the racetrack was turned into a reservoir.

The Times also took the park’s flooding as an opportunity to lament the state of horse racing, once a noble pastime.

“Soon the waters of a reservoir will cover the grounds where once fashion was supreme twice a year, when the blue-blooded horses of the North and the South, the East and the West, struggled for mastery over the old saddlebags course,” it said.

“That the waters may wipe out the remembrances of degenerate Jerome Park and leave only the memories of its brighter and earlier days is the fervent wish of every lover of the sport.”

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